"We are pleased to announce a new stable release of libtheora,
the Xiph.org Foundation's reference implementation of the royalty-free Theora video
format. This new release, version 1.1, codenamed Thusnelda, incorporates all of the recent encoder improvements we have been making over
the past year, though some of the code had its genesis all the way back in 2003.
It also brings substantial speed and robustness improvements to the 1.0 decoder." For a more visual run-down of the changes, check out Mozilla's excellent article.

With the new Theora out of the way, I hope they improve Ogg as well because right now it lags behind AAC and MP3 when it comes to quality versus size. If they can over take MP3 but 95% of what AAC can deliver then it'll strike another blow against MP3 and AAC.

MP3 has never been a state-of-the-art audio codec. Just good enough for most people.

Vorbis (the audio codec used mostly in ogg container) has been ahead in quality for years. It was the video that was missing, and with this release I guess that Theora is probably close enough to h.264 (and probably ahead of DivX and the like).

I agree in the plugins/tools thing, though. It is still not easy to encode/decode theora videos with the usual programs.

MP3 has never been a state-of-the-art audio codec. Just good enough for most people.

True, but LAME has done a pretty good job squeezing every last bit of quality out of the format

Vorbis (the audio codec used mostly in ogg container) has been ahead in quality for years. It was the video that was missing, and with this release I guess that Theora is probably close enough to h.264 (and probably ahead of DivX and the like).

From what I understand, the next version of Ogg Vorbis will incorporate AoTuV enhancements. The problem I have though; the devices that support the format leave alot to be desired.

The dream device for me is something that brings Songbird + CD Ripping + Ogg Vorbis Support + Reliable syncronising on a flash based device that has an expansion slot with 64GB being the installed flash memory as standard

I agree in the plugins/tools thing, though. It is still not easy to encode/decode theora videos with the usual programs.

Videolan is ok for transcoding - I tend to record all my videos in lossless format, then do the encoding afterwards - I find that if I encode on the fly the fans on my laptop speed up and thus I end up with the sound of a jet engine in the background.

Maybe in the future Videolan transcoding component can be modified or possibly a new front end created so that mere mortals can do ripping, transcoding, encoding etc. via an easy to use interface.

Actually, from what I understand, Vorbis development has stopped apart from the efforts of AoTuV and others like him.

Still, it has features MP3 doesn't (like 5.1 channel support, finer-grained VBR, better metadata) and sound quality is still excellent. I don't know how well it fares against AAC, but the last time I looked they (AAC, MP3 and Vorbis) were generally indistinguishable at 128 kbps.